Monday, July 22, 2013

PNG asylum deal could be in breach of UN convention

A respected expert on international refugee law
has told RN Breakfast that Australia doesn’t have an asylum problem, but
a political problem, and refugees are paying the price, as James Bourne reports.

The
Federal Government has continued to defend its decision to send all
asylum seekers arriving by boat in Australia to Papua New Guinea. Under
the regional agreement, Australia will bear the full cost of the
plan—including the cost of genuine refugees being resettled.

Dr James Hathaway, an expert on international refugee law, told RN Breakfast that Kevin Rudd’s announcement on Friday was entirely unprecedented.‘This
plan is without question the most bizarre overreaction I have seen in
more than 30 years of working on refugee law,’ said Dr Hathaway. ‘It
just makes no sense.'‘The only mandatory deportation to PNG is
going to be so-called boat arrivals. Does the Prime Minister think that
every refugee should arrive with a Qantas first class ticket in order to
be real?'Dr Hathaway, a professorial fellow at the University of
Melbourne, suggested that the deal struck between Australia and Papua
New Guinea was in breach of the the United Nations Convention relating
to the Status of Refugees.‘The convention itself says you can’t
penalise refugees for arriving without authorisation,’ he said. ‘There
is no visa that Australia or anybody else gives for a person to come and
seek asylum.' ‘To take people who are... coming and asking for
asylum and dumping them into the hell hole of PNG is in my view both an
illegal penalty and a discriminatory penalty, which puts Australia in
breach of the convention on two points.’The crisis Prime Minister
Kevin Rudd says is addressed by the deal doesn't even exist, Dr
Hathaway said. Compared to other developed countries, Australia’s intake
of 30,000 refugees is ‘a totally average, absolutely manageable
number’. ‘What is really striking about this is that Australia,
unlike any developed country that I know, has been attracting almost
exclusively genuine refugees as boat arrivals,’ Dr Hathaway told RN.‘It’s
the boat people who seem to have attracted his ire. It’s the most
extraordinarily bizarre singling out of the group that...ought to be the
very group that we should care about the most,’ he said. ‘So
Australia does not have an asylum problem, it has a political problem,
and refugees are being made to pay the price for Kevin Rudd wanting to
appear, I think, more butch that Julia Gillard and more reactionary than
Tony Abbott.’‘The people who are so desperate—who
so fear for their loss of life that they’re prepared to put their fate
into the hands of smugglers and take a horrible boat journey to survive—are the very ones that Australia seems to want to punish.’Dr
Hathaway suggested that sending genuine refugees to Papua New Guinea
was a reckless plan, despite the nation being a signatory to the Refugee
Convention.‘We’re talking about a country that ranks 168th in
the world in terms of life expectancy, where more than half the country
doesn’t have sanitation or clean water, one in two women in PNG have
been raped, homosexuals can to jail for 14 years, this is where we’re
going to send people who have done nothing wrong, other than have the
courage to say that they don’t want to be persecuted for who they are in
the country where they lived.'The High Court’s 2011 ruling on
the Gillard government’s proposed Malaysia Solution stated that an
arrangement that doesn’t legally guarantee refugees the right to work,
education and access to the courts breached obligations under the UN
refugee convention. Despite these rights not being guaranteed by the PNG
agreement, Australian Attorney General Mark Dreyfus has said that the
arrangement ‘complies with our international obligations under the
refugee convention’.Dr Hathaway disagrees.‘The word
‘rights’ doesn’t even appear in the agreement that the Prime Minister of
Australia signed with the Prime Minister of PNG,’ he said. ‘That’s what
makes it illegal.'‘The government seems to think that its only
obligation under the convention is to make sure that somebody at risk of
being persecuted doesn’t get sent back to persecution.' ‘That
argument is what the government put to the High Court of Australia in
the Malaysia case and the High Court quite explicitly rejected that
argument.’

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